Day: March 11, 2016

Natasha Rothwell has traded 30 Rock for the Sony lot, writing now for Issa Rae’s HBO series, Insecure. But Rothwell’s own characters in her half-hour special for The Characters on Netflix are quite secure, assured and ready to break down barriers. She had been writing and creating characters for years, first as a sketch performer and improviser at both The PIT and UCB in New York City, then later as a cast member on Nick Cannon’s Wild ‘N Out for MTV2 and as a writer for Saturday Night Live. Despite what you see from her main character in The...

Come for the porn. Stay for the stand-up comedy. Plenty of pornographic film studios have garnered your attention in recent years with X-rated parodies of hit sitcoms. But what if a stand-up comedian decided to take advantage of porn’s popularity by introducing actual sex as a component of his comedy? This isn’t an episode of Nikki Glaser’s Not Safe on Comedy Central. This is a short film by Jeff Cerulli and Jay Nog, Pornedian. Starring stand-up Greg Stone as struggling stand-up “Donnie Trunk,” who meets up with heralded a porn parody director (played by Harry Terjanian), who hooks him...

Lots of changes in Cameron Esposito‘s world this past year. She got married. She realized her wife can change the headlight in her car using only her bare hands. And she realized that she wants to have a baby. It’s 2016! So how much thought should they put into finding the appropriate sperm donor for this situation, and how can Esposito find a way to remove all of the hair from the equation? Some of these questions are definitely answered in her performance on Thursday’s The Late Late Show with James Corden. For the rest, you’ll have to watch...

Many movies will debut at film festivals such as Sundance, SXSW and Tribeca, but The Second Sound Barrier is not one of those films. It’s an all-star short spoof that’s somehow also branded content? That’s how they do it these days. Kind of like getting catfished. So when Robert Graham fragrances got Ariel Schulman on board its ad campaign, the team turned to David Wain and Michael Showalter. And they made a four-minute action spoof starring Jeremy Sisto, Juliette Lewis, Ken Marino, Peter Mensah, Steve Little, Bob Stephenson, Vincent Kartheiser, Bart McCarthy and Al Foster. “Why make a full-length...

Kate Berlant’s 36-minute special for The Characters series on Netflix opens in a most remarkable way, as she barely appears onscreen in the first few minutes. Instead, one after another, real-life artists, actors and architects sing the praises of the performance artist “Denise St. Roy.” Casey Jane Ellison, Jemima Kirke, Tony Berlant, Todd Oldham, Frank Gehry, Billy Powers, Ed Moses, Alicia Silverstone, Peggy Noland, and Benksy all appear as themselves. “All of us, all of her friends and I have been looking forward to what she’s going to come up with next. It could be any scale. It could be...